


Comparative Madness

by Jennifer-Oksana (JenniferOksana)



Series: Now It's Dark AU [10]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Dark, Character Death, Character Turned Into Vampire, Crossover, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-27
Updated: 2016-01-27
Packaged: 2018-05-16 12:09:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,343
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5828035
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenniferOksana/pseuds/Jennifer-Oksana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Little sister comes home covered blood, none of it hers. Because she has a destiny.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Comparative Madness

**Author's Note:**

> \+ + +  
> “Never was one for a prissy girl  
> Coquette, calling for an ambulance  
> Reach high, doesn’t mean she’s holy  
> Just mean she’s got her cellular handy  
> Almost brave, almost pregnant  
> Almost in love– Vanilla–” –Tori Amos  
> \+ + +

Little sister comes home covered in blood, none of it hers.

Fitting. She seems blessed with the gift of creating messes that don’t leave a scratch on her divinely adored ass. She smiles at me when she catches sight of me and her eyes are lit like fireflies. I can tell she has a delicious plan buzzing somewhere in her brain.

“Drusil-ll-lll-la,” she trills, her voice drunk and lustful with death. “I’m home!”

Drusilla rushes from her corner of cushions and dolls to seize Dana and cover her in kisses.

“You smell of dead things!” Dru coos. “Like potpourri and death. I like it so. And so does Miss Edith.”

“Dru, I missed you,” she replies with a smile and an affectionate caress. “And how is my other sister?”

“Bored,” I say honestly. “You promised us revenge, Dana, and off you go cavorting with deities, leaving us here to languish in provincial caves.”

She smiles again and slips her arm around Dru’s waist. “I appreciate your honesty. And I promise that we’re all reunited now and much death will follow. Drusilla, honey, where’s your puppy, sweetie?”

Drusilla pouts and rolls her head like she was a rag doll.

“He’s over there. I think I played too hard with him. He doesn’t squeak so much no more,” she say, pointing sadly to the darkest corner of our home. “What are we going to do now that you’re home?”

“Play harder,” she says wryly. I hear her walk to the dark corner. I hear a soft moan. Then Dana pokes her head out of the corner and glares at me.

“Drusilla, you almost broke him for good! I have big plans for him,” she says. “He’s family, you know. And our family is going to start something unstoppable, so we all need to be a hundred and ten percent.”

“So is that before or after you clean off the dried blood?” I ask, tired of hearing big promises with no details. “My God, what did you do, anyway? You look like a teen horror movie victim.”

“I went to San Diego and ate what was left of my family,” Dana replies with an indifferent shrug. “Darla, for the love of God, he’s fucked. Do we have anything that’ll work on him fast? The blood of six virgins? A good romp with one under the full moon?”

Drusilla’s eyes light up. “Oh, my baby girl, I have JUST the treat for our puppy,” she says. “I found her in the cemetery. It’ll revive his blood.”

She trots off and returns with the little redhead witch who hangs out with the Slayer. Willow, I think her name is. The fear is rising off her in big, stinky waves.

“You can’t do this to me! Buffy will kill all of you!” Willow shouts, trying to get away. Dana sneers.

“Shut up about the Slayer,” she snarls. “If she’s going to kill me, fine. Great. But when one is marked by the gods for a big destiny like me, Slayers matter less. And you’re going to be dead either way. So shut up. You’re giving me a headache.”

Willow stares at her, and she makes the most pathetic little moan. It sounds like a kitten trying to be just charming enough to avoid being thrown into a lake. Dana walks up to Dru and Willow, stopping to touch Dru’s arm again. Then she looks the witch up and down, a businesslike appreciation in her eyes.

“Please don’t kill me,” the girl whispers to Dana. Dana puts a blood-stained finger on her lips and then cups her face.

“What does she do?” she asks me.

“Witch things.”

“Oh, Lord,” Dana says, rolling her eyes. “Well, do we have supplies? I have medical supplies, don’t I?”

“I found her with all her dark materials,” Dru says. “Wicked things, the devil’s tools for the devil’s witches.”

“Witches don’t believe in–” the girl begins, but a cool glance from Dana shuts her up.

“Do your fixing thing,” Dana orders. “We can argue comparative theology later, okay? Get to work and save my vampire brother, okay?”

Willow doesn’t move. She stares at Dana, who’s unimpressed.

“What will that do for me?” she asks, begging for mercy with her very posture, but trying to sound tough. Mortals. What can you do?

“You have half an hour to hope,” Dana whispers, reaching out and pushing the hair back from the witch’s face. “If you’re going to be difficult, you’ll just die now. If not, you’ll die when you’re done with Spike. Who knows what’ll happen in thirty minutes?”

It’s a killer argument. The witch immediately pulls away from Drusilla and hurries into the dark corner where Spike is all chained up. He’s been ridden hard and put away wet, so to speak.

Dana wanders back over to Drusilla, her eyes dreamy. Then she holds her arm out to me, lost somewhere in a personal reverie I can’t get into. There’s a strange contentment in her posture and her skin that rises from her in crystalline waves.

“I’m going to die,” she says, stretching out. “And it’s going to be perfect.”

“Are you getting into Heaven, too?” I ask sarcastically.

“Will you see your baby? And your darling love?” Dru asks, oblivious to sarcasm. Crazy people never do get the whole sarcasm thing. That’s one of the reasons being near Dru is usually not fun.

Dana pulls away from Dru and shakes her head.

“Drusilla, there will be no more heaven. No more hell either,” she says in a flat voice. “It’s my final reward. Oblivion. Nothing. Or maybe I’ll go to hell. At least I don’t have anything else to hope for.”

My little sister is an idealistic fool. She doesn’t understand that there can be hope even in hell. No, instead her hands fall instinctively to her tummy and you can almost see the wheels turning. She has a bloody crusade waiting for us and she’s ready to be the martyr. With us crushed beneath her heels, no doubt.

“But there’s always hope!” the witch pipes in from the darkness. “Why would you want there to be no more hope?”

“I used to hope,” Dana says, her words becoming ice in the air, brittle and breakable. “Don’t we all hope? When I was ten, I hoped to be a doctor, a princess, and a magician. When I was twenty, I hoped to have a fulfilling career and a happy life. When I was thirty, I hoped I could help others and do good work.”

I’ve grown very used to the litany. Dana Scully’s life, the shattering of hopes from birth 'til death in inexorable progress. Sometimes I wish I could explain to the girl that all of us lose our hopes and dreams every day. Of course, her life does resonate with that prophetic operatic tragedy air, but shit. Even with alien abductions and dead babies, it could have been worse. She could have been a starving African child or an Anne Rice fan or something.

“Six months ago, I hoped for two things. I hoped that my baby would live and I hoped that my one true love would come back to me.”

One true love. This man is the mythical Agent Mulder, the one, the only, the legendary. I don’t know if she realizes it, but he’s become more legendary with every tear she drops from her undead eyes. He used to just be her partner and her best friend. And the father, of course, but that was obvious.

“What happened?”

“I found two fingers in the desert,” Dana says, flat monotone. “They found the rest a hundred miles away in a ditch.” I’ve seen the fingers. They’re disgusting. She keeps them in a little velvet bag, along with a sonogram. It’s very, very disturbing, but no worse than things Dru has kept in her drawers. At least the fingers don’t stink anymore. “And I fell down. And when I came to–”

“That’s really sad,” Willow says, peeking out from the dark. “But does it give you the right to do–”

“Fix the vampire!” Dana snaps. “I didn’t pay you to talk!”

“You–”

“Shut up or I’ll pull out your tongue and make you eat it in a sandwich.”

Wow. Little witchie-poo said I was thinking. It’s a pity she’s not a psychotic, divine-right vampire queen with a grudge against all living things. Maybe she could be the one to give Dana some harsh news about the cruel and unusual nature of the world. Fuck it all, I actually had sex with Angelus. I was actually with Angelus before I lost him. This one had one night of pretty crappy sex. That’s it.

“Grandmother’s cranky,” Dru says. “She thinks little sister has turned the corner.”

“Oh, I have,” Dana replies vaguely, patting Drusilla’s hair. “I’m not stable or sane or anything. What sort of sane person prays to die? And what sort of person prays that everyone dies with her?” She smiles at me with absolutely no light gleaming from her ice-blue eyes. I’m suddenly reminded of Drusilla’s dolls. “It’s just a question of dying now or later, Darla. What’s there to be afraid of?”

“Take it from someone’s who’s been the regular sort of dead. There’s nothing to it,” I say evenly. “You are simply in love with being avenged. Can’t you just get over it? We can burn the city to the ground, but then we’ll have to eat each other. That’s being a vampire. We like the idea of being gloriously evil, but glorious evil is inefficient.”

“So?”

“So I don’t want to die anytime soon and neither do you.”

She doesn’t say anything. Instead she smiles at me, with her eyes that are the color of a dead summer sky, the kind of sky we can never see again. Behind her eyes, she’s hiding something, even from herself. She wants to die. Every particle of her being wants to die gloriously. But there’s something else inside of her and that’s the thing no one can stop.

“Little sister’s got a secret in her heart, but she doesn’t know it’s there,” Dru coos. “She’ll stop the world on a platter to watch it spin or fall apart.”

I hate it when Drusilla’s crazy talk makes sense to me. Little sister does have a secret. She has this destiny thing that even she can’t stop. No wonder she can drag us all around like pet puppies. It’s like Angel again. They’re very unattractive as people, as personalities, when you get right down to it. But you can feel the destiny pulling you in like a drain.

“Does it burn?” Dru asked Dana.

What was left for her, after all? Dana, the regular, everyday Dana with no destiny, really did want to die. But what does the destiny need her to do? That’s much more important.

“How’s it going back there, Willow?” she asks casually, keeping her eyes trained on me.

“Ow!” Spike replies for her.

“Oh, God,” Dana growls. She sweeps up and disappears into the back room. There’s an audible crack as the witch’s neck snaps. Or at least I think it’s the witch.

“Oh my GOD!” the girl screams. “You killed him! You killed Spike!”

“I decided I was tired of him,” Dana said diffidently. There’s a moist sound and I realize that Dana’s also draining him dry. Dru whimpers.

“She killed the puppy! She killed my Spike!”

“Shut up! I’ll get you a new one!” Dana yells wetly. “Now come here, little girl. I’ll show you what it feels like to stop hoping.”

She cries, but I already know the outcome. I can almost see through my sister’s eyes. The look of fear as she pulls girl’s head up to lay a few cold fingers on the throat, an appraisal of the fresh meat.

It’s so funny. Those damned little children have killed a thousand vampires but they’ve never really thought they would die. They watched death like it was a television show. They felt death and thought it was a chill.

“Shh,” Dana whispers. We can hear her whispering. There’s no sound. Just her whispers of shh and the pounding of a heart that will never beat again. “Shh, don’t cry.”

“Please,” the girl whimpers.

“No, baby, no,” Dana says. Her voice has changed. It doesn’t sound like the mad queen of destiny anymore. It’s frightened, shivering into slivers of ice that could pierce the skin. “It won’t hurt. I promise.”

We all hear it when she pierces the throat. The wailing gets higher pitched and hysterical with despair.

“Please! Please don’t do this! Somebody help me–Mom, God, Buffy, Tara, Buffy, Mom Mommy Mommy Mommy please help me somebody! Xander! Buffy! Please help me! Please don’t do this!”

It’s the squeal of a lamb at the slaughter. And finally it stops.

And then there is the second scream.

Drusilla and I run into the back room, where the blood is running thick and deep. I’m going to ruin my shoes.

“I killed the baby,” Dana whispers, her hand over her mouth. “Oh my God, I killed it.”

She bursts into tears and runs off. Drusilla moans. And I’m just totally pissed off. She just killed Spike and the Slayer’s best friend and she’s chosen now to go all crazy? No, no, no, not today. I’m nipping this in the bud.

“Of course you killed her! You’re a vampire! It’s what you do!” I scream, thundering into the room. “Do you get it? We don’t have destinies. We don’t need grand schemes. We live for the kill. And for each other. That’s all. That’s what we are. If you can’t deal with that, you should fucking kill yourself already and put us all out of our misery!”

She looks up me. Her eyes are as blank as one of Drusilla’s dolls in her porcelain perfection face. I don’t think she hears me.

“I have to take a shower,” she says. “And then it’s time to end this.”


End file.
